


He would be free in the morning to go where he would

by Trismegistus (Lebateleur)



Category: Blake & Avery Series - M. J. Carter
Genre: Emotionally Repressed Englishmen, Feels, First Time, Hand Jobs, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Missing Scene, Things left unsaid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-15
Updated: 2017-06-15
Packaged: 2018-11-14 07:34:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11203350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lebateleur/pseuds/Trismegistus
Summary: When William Avery collapses onto the bed next to Jeremiah Blake, it is with a sense of relief that the mysterious deaths at the Reform Club have been explained.  But other questions remain that aren't so easily resolved.Set between Parts Two and Three ofThe Devil's Feast.





	He would be free in the morning to go where he would

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DoreyG](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoreyG/gifts).



I felt that sleep would come easily now the Reform's burden had been lifted from my shoulders, but with two of us in the room the air soon grew close and I slept but shallowly. Eventually I cast the coverlet off, and fell at last into a deeper slumber.

When I woke next it was still night. I could not have said what roused me. There had been no sudden knock at the door, no alarm raised in the hall, and beyond the window the street was as quiet as any London street at nighttime ever is. Gradually I became aware that Blake had pressed himself against me in his sleep. His arm was thrown about my waist. 

I knew I should disengage from him at once, but his ordeal in the Marshalsea had left him exhausted and worn, and I feared any movement might wake him. It must also be said that my wits were dulled with fatigue and overindulgence and at the time it did not seem worth the effort. I remember thinking in irritation that he would have done well to discard his own bedclothes before pressing so close, for I was once again uncomfortably warm. My hair stuck to my forehead and the nape of my neck; I brushed it back and then drifted off once more.

When I next woke I could not have said how I knew that he was awake, only that he was. He lay perfectly still, but I could feel his attention fixed upon me as though he had pinned me beneath one of his stares. “Can't sleep?” he said.

“It's warm,” I muttered irritably.

“Mm.” He shifted slightly, and a moment later I felt the tug of the sheets as he pulled them off and cast them away over the side of the bed. With them gone, the air flowed in over my skin, and it became easier to breathe. I was drifting back toward sleep as Blake settled against me once more. I yawned, and blinked sleepily into the darkness. 

In a matter of hours it would be dawn, and I would return to my life in Devon. “Tell me about Thibet,” I said. It was a gamble, for he had always disliked speaking about himself. But come daylight he would be on a ship to America, and I thought it unlikely that I should ever see him again. 

“How do you know about Thibet?” he asked in surprise, and then more guardedly, “What did Collinson tell you?”

“Nothing,” said I. “Why should Collinson have said anything to me about it? You spoke to me of it yourself, in passing. As we fled Jubblepore,” I added into the face of his wary silence.

He was silent a moment longer and then responded with a short bark of a laugh, and I was relieved to hear that there was real humor, even pleasure, in it. “I'm surprised you remember anything of that. You were half out of your wits with hunger and fear.”

I bristled a little to hear him describe my condition thus, but it was not a gross exaggeration. I had been starving and fearful during our flight across the jangal. Indeed, I doubt anything less than Blake's uncharacteristic talkativeness, and the fantastic nature of the experiences he described, could have served to distract me from our ordeal.

We had both settled more deeply against one another as we spoke. For all that we slept in the one of the finest clubs to be found in the whole of civilization, somehow it did not feel so different from the nights spent with my men high in the wilderness of the Kush. I yawned, and my eyes watered. “Thibet,” I urged him. “You need not be so reluctant to speak of it. Whatever Collinson put you up to there can hardly be more fantastical than the exploits you've already related to me.”

He made a noise, somehow both agitated and noncommittal, in the back of his throat.

I tried again. “Whatever it was, Jeremiah, you have my word that I will be too tired to remember anything of it come morning, so you are free to be forthcoming.” He snorted, and I nudged him ineffectually in the ribs. 

To my surprise, he spoke. I had not expected him to oblige me. “The mountains there are the tallest of any I have seen anywhere,” he said. “It is as though they pierce the very sky itself, and it was weeks before Mountstuart and I overcame the sickness it caused us to ascend them.

“At any rate, they form a natural barrier between India to the west and the Ching Empire to the east, and the natives there jealously guard their independence from both. They follow the teachings of the sage known as the Buddha, who was himself born in India but is no longer worshiped there.”

“I know,” I said. “There are colossal statues of him in Bamiyan as well. I've seen them with my own eyes, although the tribesmen told me they depict evil giants, or wizards.”

“And yet you knew them for what they were?” An undercurrent of suspicion had crept back into his voice.

I shrugged. “I asked an antiquarian from the Museum about them—we dined together at the Oriental Club when I first came to London. I have no doubt the natives believed what they told me, but I thought there must be more to it, all the same. After all, who bothers to carve a great statue of a demon?”

I did not hear his laugh, but rather felt the puff of his exhalation against the skin of my neck. “My word, young William Avery seeking to understand the history of the land in which he finds himself, instead of simply trying to subjugate it in the name of civilization. Who would have believed it possible, had they known you just four years ago?”

“For that, you have no one to blame but yourself,” I responded, but without any true pique, for I could hear the pleasure in his voice and it awoke within me a satisfaction I did not care to examine head on. 

At any rate, my statement appeared to have won him over, for he began to speak of his days in Thibet in detail. It was as fascinating as any tale he had ever told, having to do with a man who chose the vessel of his own rebirth and native clairvoyants with the ability to unearth mystic treasures hidden in the landscape many centuries past. And yet, I found I could not keep my eyes open, and I drifted in and out of consciousness as he spoke.

If anything, my weariness lent an air of heightened mystery to Blake's tale, for I would fall asleep as he and Mountstuart prepared to ford a swollen river raging with the spring melt, and wake to him fleeing through a crowded bazaar, alone, with the Tsar's agents in pursuit.

“You must have feared you would not escape,” I murmured, not because I believed there was anything in the world that could frighten Jeremiah Blake, but simply to keep him talking. True to my word, I could recall very little of what he had said, and I worried he would cease his tale altogether if he thought me asleep. Although I was too tired to follow closely, the mere sound of his voice was comforting, and I did not want him to stop. He snorted, and I knew he had seen through my ruse, but he continued nonetheless. 

He had turned his head into the pillow, as though he meant for it to swallow his words before anyone might hear them. But it did not, and they jolted me awake. “No, it was the _Marchioness of Blandford_ from which I thought I would never escape. Setting foot upon its decks was most frightening thing I have ever done.”

“Surely you cannot mean it,” I said. 

I could tell by his sudden intake of breath that I had taken him aback. He had not thought I was attending to his story at all. I regretted instantly having spoken, for now he would return to his habitual reticence, and I would never learn what he had meant by it. 

Yet contrary to my every expectation, he continued. “Avery, even you must have realised that once I left Calcutta's shores, I would never set foot in India again.”

“But you were going home,” I began, but he cut me off before I could speak a word more, and an anger I had not heard since the early days of our acquaintance was plain in every syllable. “I had lived in India for seventeen years, William. I had grown to manhood there, taken a wife. I spoke seven of its languages and twice as many of its dialects. I was welcome in the courts of a dozen raos, and known to every barber from Madras to Karachi, and I had made my home with the natives in Blacktown even before I left the Company.” He laughed bitterly. “What did I know of England?”

I started to say once more that England was his home, but stopped as I began to grasp his meaning. For all that I had found myself bemused—and frequently irritated—by Blake's predilection for native dress and customs, at his preference for native company to that of his countrymen and the way he made no attempt to hide it, I had always thought him as English as I, even in the very heart of the mofussil. It had never occurred to me that he might consider himself to be anything else. 

But then, why should he not? I had gone to India with a head full of Mounstuart's verse and no true understanding of what I would find there, but I had done so of my own free will. Blake had been transported, only just out of childhood, to a land where he knew no one and had no prospects. And there he had learned to move freely through native society, while I cringed to remember how the Company's soldiers and civilians both had spoken of him.

And that was not all. For it had been Blake's countrymen in England who had cast him out to India, and who had expelled from India too, once they had done with him there. It was a discomfiting thought. I rested my hand briefly atop his and felt him release a long, pent-up breath against my neck. 

“We should rest,” I said at last. He shifted a little, groaning as he took the weight from one of his limbs, and settled back into the mattress. We lapsed again into silence. My eyes drifted shut. Gradually I became aware of the weight of his hand atop my thigh. 

I do not think he had meant to turn to me in his sleep, but this time he was fully awake and there could be no question as to his intent. The last time a man had acted thus, many years ago in Shahseram, I had summarily ejected him from my bed. I did not do so now, nor did I speak as the spread of Blake's fingers widened. Only when they slid to cup at the front of my trousers did I come to my senses and attempt to move away. His arm tightened like a vise, pinning me in place. 

“Jeremiah, this is—”

“Hush, William,” he said. “I know what I'm about.” 

I should have protested more stridently then, and, had he not listened, removed myself from the bed. But may God forgive me, I did not. He waited a moment longer, gauging the extent of my acquiescence, and then continued. His fingers trailed along the front of my trousers, up and down, and it was not long before I responded as any man must in such circumstances. My heart was racing, and I could hardly breathe. 

What else could I do? Slowly, I reached down a hand to fumble my buttons open, and then pulled the fabric aside so that my member could spring free. I felt his sigh against my neck, and then the heat—oh God, the heat—of his skin as his fingers closed around me. His grip was firm, the skin of his palm calloused and rough. 

He began slowly, long, confident strokes that left me dazed and trembling. I tried to hold myself steady, to turn my thoughts toward anything else, but he was inexorable, and it was not long before he had worked out the rhythm I liked best. My hips began to rock of their own accord and soon I was thrusting quickly into his hand. The room began to fill with the scent of my perspiration. 

“Like this, William?” he whispered, lips against my ear. “Is this what you like best? Oh, and this?” I bit my lip and fought to control myself, but it was not long before I was made to pant and whimper once more at his touch. 

“Yes,” I gasped. “I—no, ahh—” The legs of the bed were creaking against the floor. He had pressed himself hard against me, and I could feel the sweaty heat of him through my shirt. All the while, his hand worked expertly against my member.

It was good, but it was not enough. I half-rose to hands and knees, I was gasping, frantic. I wanted desperately to mount something, mount him, but that was madness, two men did not— 

“Oh, William, _mera larka_ , so very eager,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse, thick with something I could not identify. He took me by the waist, pulled me to my knees and roughly pulled down my trousers. His phallus thrust between my thighs. I struggled against him then, but his teeth closed over my neck in warning and the next moment he had settled me against his hips and begun to thrust in earnest. The slap of his skin against my buttocks echoed obscenely in the confines of the room. 

Any man would be alarmed to find himself thus used, but perversely it felt like nothing so much as another of Blake's tests, and if he meant for me to be discomfited, I was determined to give him no sign of it. I pressed my thighs around him and won a long, breathy moan for my troubles. He spat in his hand and clasped it once more around my cock, and I moaned too and gave myself over completely to sensation. 

I worked myself against him with increasing urgency, the touch of his hand wringing gasps and moans from my throat. And all the while he kept up a constant murmur against my neck. “Steady. Steady, now, William. Not yet. Not just yet, I'm almost there, not yet—” but it was too much and I spent myself over him in a long, shuddering spasm. 

He cried out, and wrapped his hands around my chest. “Jeremiah, please,” I said, although what I begged him for, even I could not have said. His head was buried against the crook of my neck, his thighs slapping rhythmically against me. I twined my fingers through his, ran my hands along his arms, his stubbled jaw, as he thrust greedily between my legs until his seed came pulsing out to slick against my thighs and we both collapsed atop the mattress. 

I lolled against him, dazed. For a time neither of us spoke. Then he stirred, and groaned, and ran a hand over his eyes. A moment later he rose and retrieved the bedclothes from the floor. For a wild moment I thought he meant to settle down beside the hearth, and indeed I don't think I could have borne it had he left me to lie in the bed alone, but in the end he lay back down upon the mattress and drew me down next to him. 

“Jeremiah,” I began and then broke off, for what could I have possibly said next? And yet the fact remained that I—we—surely had to say something. 

“Tomorrow, William,” he murmured. “There will be time for all that tomorrow.”

I was tired, and I was drunk and leaden with the pleasure of release, I did not want him to go to America, and to leave it all until the morning was a temptation too strong to resist. I laid my head next to his and fell slowly into sleep. When I did, I dreamed it was 1839, and that we had never left India.

**Author's Note:**

> Dear DoreyG, thank you for the opportunity to gift a fic in this fandom! I absolutely love this series, and there is some serious tension between these two that is just crying out for fandom to explore. I had a small celebration when I saw that I had matched for this fandom, and I hope you enjoy reading this fic as much as I did writing it!


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